Time to step up your boom and stop crime as a super-powered Agent in Crackdown 3's sandbox of mayhem and destruction. Explore the heights of a futuristic city, race through the streets in a transforming vehicle, and use your powerful abilities to stop a ruthless criminal empire. Crackdown 3 delivers cooperative mayhem and an all-new multiplayer mode where destruction is your ultimate weapon powered by Microsoft Cloud.

Set in 2045, a major blackout has plunged the world’s major metropolitan areas into darkness and chaos. The Agency, the world’s elite taskforce of peace and justice, has picked up a hot lead and they’ll stop at nothing to find the ones responsible and deliver a harsh dose of justice… by any means necessary.

Crackdown 3 brings super-powered Agents to New Providence, a futuristic open-world city ripe for exploration, now on the brink of collapse at the hands of the corrupt criminal network TerraNova, Incorporated. Join Commander Jaxon and The Agency to take on the crime lords of New Providence using your tools of mayhem and chaos, like the singularity gun that shoots off a black hole and pulls destruction into its path for maximum impact. And as an Xbox Play Anywhere title with cross-save and cross-play support, you can bring the boom solo or with four-player online co-op over Xbox Live on Xbox One and Windows 10.

Crackdown 3 also comes with Wrecking Zone, a 100% destructible battle arena powered by Microsoft Cloud — we’ll have more details to share later this Summer.

Terry Crews, the voice of Commander Jaxon, joins Xbox host Larry Hryb, writer Jon Goff, and members of the Crackdown development team from art, design and narrative to discuss the behind-the-scenes development of Crackdown 3. In addition, they reveal some exciting new Crackdown 3 news and answer fan questions.

At E3 2014, we announced the return of the Crackdown franchise with the unveil of our newest title – Crackdown 3 – and established an exciting and ambitious vision to redefine open-world gaming. Then at gamescom 2015, we showed that creating completely physical and destructible multiplayer environments is possible through the power of Microsoft Cloud and Xbox Live. Today, we are excited to confirm that Crackdown 3 will be available for both Xbox One and Windows 10 PCs, and will be an Xbox Play Anywhere title so you can buy one and play across either device.

Crackdown 3 is a game built for the future with a multiplayer experience that will redefine what it feels like to play games, and as we continue to work on this, it has become clear that our original timeline of delivering multiplayer to fans this summer, while maintaining the size, scope and quality of the game, would be challenging. Our top priority is to give gamers an experience they have never seen before at a scale never thought possible, and sticking to our original timeline would have compromised that goal.

We know that many are looking forward to becoming Agents in Crackdown 3 and we are committed to delivering the best experience in 2017. This decision was made with our fans and their gaming experience in mind.

While we won’t be at E3, we cannot wait to show you the future of Crackdown 3 soon.

Dave JonesCreative Director, Reagent Games

Out 2016 with a MP Beta next Summer. There's an expansive single player campaign, which you can play offline. But as well as that there's a 4 player co-op campaign which is the same thing but it is online,

Are you ready to become a super-powered Agent of justice? Ready to explore the heights of a futuristic city, race through streets in a transforming vehicle, and use some amazing abilities to tear apart a ruthless criminal empire?

Well, you’d better get ready… Crackdown 3 has just been unveiled and it’s an Xbox One exclusive like no other – a sandbox of mayhem and destruction featuring an open-world campaign that you’ll be able to play cooperatively online, and a revolutionary new cloud-powered multiplayer mode where destruction is your ultimate weapon.

Honoring the classic, open-world Crackdown experience adored by fans, Crackdown 3 is bringing you a 4-person co-operative campaign enhanced with a new dynamic story, cutting-edge weapons and vehicles, enemies you’ll love to hate – and of course, tons of orbs to collect!

Crackdown 3 will also deliver a groundbreaking competitive multiplayer mode, where everything is physical thanks to the Microsoft Cloud. Harness 20 times the power of your Xbox One to unleash 100 percent destructible environments for the first time ever in gaming and create your own explosive stories in the process.

Developed by Dave Jones and his UK-based studio Reagent Games – the minds behind the original Crackdown and Grand Theft Auto – fans can begin their Agency Training in Crackdown 3 multiplayer in Summer of 2016.

Whether you play Crackdown 3 for its entirely new campaign or its revolutionary multiplayer, one thing is for sure: you’ll never look at an open-world experience the same way again!

TEARING DOWN THE WALLS OF THE PAST

Open World gaming has always been synonymous with “go anywhere, do anything” – and while the campaign for Crackdown 3 is set to deliver a massive new city for you to play in and explore, it’s our groundbreaking multiplayer mode that truly embraces the “do anything” part of the open world promise.

For decades, walls have existed in games – and they’ve remained largely unchanged over time. From the humble wall in a 3D monster maze, to any wall in current gen games, these barriers tend to exhibit two common characteristics: they are there to constrict you, and they are fake. You shoot them with an assault rifle and a game designer tells the game to stick a “bullet hole” decal at the point of impact. Shoot it with a rocket launcher, you get a bigger “scorch mark.” Even colossal mechs find walls in most video games to be immovable objects with infinite health.

Why can’t you shoot a hole in the wall?

Why can’t you blast an opening and step through it?

Why can’t you make the wall collapse, crushing the enemy that was hiding behind it?

The answer is simple, and it’s the same answer that has historically held back how rich and detailed game developers can make their worlds: Compute power and memory.

The walls in Crackdown 3 Multiplayer are not inhibited by such things. Our walls are connected to the Microsoft Cloud, which provides compute power and memory on demand.

Every bullet you fire at a wall in Crackdown 3 Multiplayer removes a piece of it. Barriers act as you would expect when being peppered by projectiles…

No doors around? Not a problem, create one. Want to slice off the top of a skyscraper and have it crush your enemies below? Go ahead. Want to bring the whole building crashing down in the direction of your choice? You can make it happen in Crackdown 3 Multiplayer.

While most multiplayer games today run entirely on a single server, we are enabling multiple server cloud connections just to manage the structures in our world – arming each of our players with 20x the power of a single Xbox One to unleash 100% destruction.

All this adds up to more unlimited possibilities. Play the game how you want to play it.

GameCentral reports back from Gamescom on what may be the most technically impressive console game ever made.

There have been a lot of great-looking video games released in the last two years or so, but for the most part the new generation of consoles has done little to drop jaws from their normal position. But that all changed when we got a go on Xbox One exclusive Crackdown 3. The game doesn’t necessarily look particularly impressive in static screenshots, but when you see its destruction effects in motion it feels like the sort of revolution that has been a long time coming.

It was only the first proper day of Gamescom today, but Crackdown 3 was easily the most impressive thing we saw – and that included a hands-off demo of Fallout 4 and the destruction-filled Just Cause 3 (we’ll write those previews up later). In fact amongst our excited demands for the final game we insisted that Jones and his team licence the tech out so we can finally get a decent Superman and Godzilla game.

But what really has us so excited is that this is not technology for technology’s sake. Developer Reagent Games haven’t spent years inventing ways to make slightly more realistic looking moustaches (yes, that was a dig at The Order: 1886), they’ve used it to create something that would’ve been completely impossible in the previous generation. That’s what we’ve been waiting for, and we couldn’t be more excited to see Crackdown 3 finally destroy any lingering disappointment with the current generation.

Crackdown 3 effectively turns your Xbox One into the most powerful console ever made

So, Crackdown 3 might be the most impressive demo I've ever seen. We'll have a full preview up later today, but suffice it to say that all that bluster about "leveraging the Cloud" to bring hitherto unseen levels of physics-based destruction is totally accurate. That moment in the CG teaser trailer where an Agent collapses a building into another building to kill the naughty crime boss inside? You can do that. Easily. I've seen it happen. I have seen such things.

While the offline single-player game plays out like the Crackdown of old, it's in multiplayer - set in an entirely separate city - where the game flexes its next-gen muscles. It works off of a startlingly simple conceit - the city is divided into distinct sections, each governed by a single server. When you start destroying things in an area, the physics calculations are sent to its server, and the results are sent back to your Xbox, which resolves that into everything from a single bullethole to a skyscraper tumbling down.

If you, say, blow a chunk off of a building, which then flies into an adjacent area and smashes the window of the tower block next door, that neighbouring server then helps the original to resolve this. Destruction is persistent, and every piece of rubble remains interactive, and can continue to be shot, blown up or pushed around. Servers can be piled on servers to keep this working - in our demo, we saw 11 being used at once. Producer, Dave Jones, assured me that that was the tip of the digital iceberg.

You'd think this would require an immense internet connection to keep it rolling, not least when four players (this is the current maximum size for a multiplayer party, although it could increase) are doing the same thing in four separate corners of the city, but the relative ease of swapping information between Xbox and server means the strain is fairly small. Jones says that his team are optimising the game for a 2-4mbps connection.

So, I ask the question - does this technology make the Xbox One more powerful? Jones nods. Does it, effectively, make it the most powerful console ever made while those servers are running? Jones nods. While Crackdown utilises it purely for physics, the opportunity here is clear. Who knows what another company could make with this, given the time? For the moment, though, I'm not entirely bothered - I just knocked a penthouse balcony off its moorings and watched it take 20 others out on its way to the ground. I'm still smiling.

The Crackdown 3 multiplayer game will blow you (and everything else) away

We knew before Gamescom that Microsoft would be showing off the new Crackdown for Xbox One. Now, we've seen it, and the multiplayer experience especially is going to blow you away,

We were privileged enough to not just see it in action, but actually to take the multiplayer game out for a spin.

One of the headline features of Crackdown 3 is the use of the cloud to take on the physics computations which allows for the sheer scale of destruction possible. We'll touch on that in a minute, but it's important not to neglect the single player, story driven game. The important thing to put out there right at the start is that the cloud physics are not in the main game. The reason for this is simple: people want to play offline. Since you're already connected to play multiplayer, it makes total sense.

The single player game doesn't take anything away from what Crackdown has always set out to be. It's still a 3D platforming game; you can climb any building you can see, and you're still trying to take down the Crime Lords as a member of the Agency. It's skills for kills, so you'll get better the more bad guys you take out, but there's a new gameplay mechanic in action known as the Hate System.

The Crime Lords are more difficult than ever to beat in Crackdown 3. They're not putting themselves out there in harms way for you to just find and kill. Instead, you have to draw them out, and that's where the Hate System comes in. You'll need to target their businesses, their runners, essentially cause trouble for them and make them hate you. It's not a static measure, either, and hate will drop after a while if you don't keep plugging away. Once the hate bar reaches 100%, the boss comes out and you get your chance. The one we saw in the demo was protected by an exo-suit that bullets couldn't penetrate. So, you have to be more creative, using destructible elements in the world around you to help finish them off.

Then we get to the multiplayer. Where things are going to get crazy.

The multiplayer game is a different map to the single player experience, and it's where the power of the cloud physics comes into play. None of the graphics rendering is affected, all of that is still done on the console. All that goes off to the cloud is numbers, calculations. By freeing up the computing power of the console to concentrate on the rendering, the effects are mind blowing. Truly mind blowing.

You may also be wondering how much bandwidth you're going to need to be able to take advantage of this. The simple answer is; not much. The developers told us that the system is optimized to be used on a 2-4mbps connection, though that's based on 4-player multiplayer only at this time.

So, are we excited for Crackdown 3? Absolutely. It's still a long way off being finished (the multiplayer we went hands-on with is still pre-alpha), so we're going to have to tough it out. But based on the time left until launch to polish and perfect, and what we've already seen, this is one to beat for 2016.

When it was released in 2007, the original “Crackdown” took the Xbox 360 by storm. Players all over the world spent countless hours running, driving, and leaping around Pacific City. Whether they were taking down gangs or collecting those sweet agility orbs, fans couldn’t get enough. Now, the groundbreaking, hyper-powered world of “Crackdown” is back in stunning fashion with an all-new “Crackdown” experience for Xbox One.

Developed by original creator Dave Jones, “Crackdown” on Xbox One will deliver unrivaled verticality, cooperative mayhem and destruction. Whether you’re playing the Campaign with friends or enjoying an entirely new competitive “Crackdown” experience powered by Xbox Live, you’ll never look at an open-world game the same way again. Best of all, “Crackdown” leverages Xbox Live to power a city which isn’t just an exciting place to play, but is a part of your destructive arsenal.

We’ll be bringing you more on “Crackdown” for Xbox One in the future, but for now you can enjoy the exciting teaser trailer above.

A new Crackdown announcement will be made at Xbox's E3 Press Conference, Develop understands.

Our source suggest the open world series will be return during tonight's event, although the nature of the announcement is not quite clear. While it's most likely to be a brand new (and long overdue) outing in the series – undoubtedly for Xbox One, but possibly for Xbox 360 as well – it could even be a remastering of the 2007 original.

You will get Crackdown 3, unlikely announcement at E3 this year, as it is a 2016 release date.I can tell you that there is a deal with Microsoft and Cloudgine for the project (codenamed Nimbus) that was struck back last year.

Was previously along the lines of "Delivering rendering and processing power from the cloud, allowing game developers to define new ground-breaking online gaming mechanics" and had a Cloud Doge type image.

Owned by David Jones, before Cloudgine, who was the founder of Realtime Worlds.

Sad this is what we've been reduced to to get a hint of what games are to come But still, i'd definitely love to see some more Crackdown There's definitely a lot more they can do with this gameplay wise I think. I'd love to know who'll develop another Crackdown.

Somebody Else's Problem wrote:Probably just a link to a Crackdown TV show.

It would be nice although I haven't really played much of Crackdown 2 since I didn't like a lot of the changes. Maybe I should go back and finish it since I'll have plenty of time before I buy an Xbox One

Crackdown 2 was awful. The gameplay just wasn't as fun, the missions were incredibly repetitive and had you literally doing the exact same thing over and over again. I recall quite a few bugs as well back in the day.The first one was just so much more of a fun experience.

I can't see that ending well. It was Realtime Worlds that made Crackdown worth playing, and they are no more.

Certainly ain't enough to bring me into the fold. Infact, I'll be honest, none of the existing Xbox "experiences" are something I want enough to make me an xbox one gamer, so really it's all on the "new" franchises.

That's not to say it's impossible, because it was Gears of War and Crackdown that made me get an 360, but at this point I can't see anything worth inviting the Nextbox into my home.

You will get Crackdown 3, unlikely announcement at E3 this year, as it is a 2016 release date.I can tell you that there is a deal with Microsoft and Cloudgine for the project (codenamed Nimbus) that was struck back last year.

Was previously along the lines of "Delivering rendering and processing power from the cloud, allowing game developers to define new ground-breaking online gaming mechanics" and had a Cloud Doge type image.

Owned by David Jones, before Cloudgine, who was the founder of Realtime Worlds.

I hope this ends up being true, we're long overdue a proper Crackdown sequel after the disappointment of Crackdown 2. I whoever the devs are I don't think they can do worse than the rush job Ruffian had to do. After playing Saints 4 I wouldn't mind seeing Crackdown 3 have more of a fleshed out story and characters than compared to the first. That and definitely more variety of missions. If we get that as well as co-op then it should be awesome

This Crackdown 3 is apparently ground breaking and the cloud will be doing half the cumputung/rendering, it's MS's first game to try and prove the cloud Is real and can extend X1's life cycle. We shall see.

A new Crackdown announcement will be made at Xbox's E3 Press Conference, Develop understands.

Our source suggest the open world series will be return during tonight's event, although the nature of the announcement is not quite clear. While it's most likely to be a brand new (and long overdue) outing in the series – undoubtedly for Xbox One, but possibly for Xbox 360 as well – it could even be a remastering of the 2007 original.

Brilliant news I hope it is a proper sequel though. I'm not sure if Crackdown 1 really needs a remake. Also I reckon Crackdown is a franchise they can afford to make next gen only if they do a good job I can see it tempting some folk into buying an Xbox.